Wireless communications serve an increasingly important role in the modern world. The electromagnetic spectrum used for wireless cellular telephony is a valuable and limited resource. Consequently, many different types of cellular telephony access technologies (access modes) are being deployed in the available spectrum. Various known access modes utilize various parts of the spectrum. FIG. 1 illustrates an example multi-mode radio frequency (RF) band in which several different technologies might be deployed. In this example, RF band 100 contains spectral components 102, 104, 106, and 108 corresponding to the wide band LTE standard, the GSM standard, the narrow band LTE standard, and the time division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) standard, respectively. Other scenarios can also exist where the wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) and CDMA2000 1X standards are deployed.
Some conventional techniques that employ received signal strength indication (RSSI) measurements for signal scanning require all possible channels to be scanned, which can increase the time spent scanning for or synchronizing to candidate base stations. When multiple modes are deployed in RF band 100 as shown in FIG. 1, initial acquisition could be slow because each possible access mode needs to be scanned for the RF band 100. Conventional scanning techniques do not provide any indication of what type of access mode may be present in any particular frequency region. Even if it is known that a particular access mode is only deployed in a portion of the band, that entire portion would still need to be scanned to look for usable base stations. As a result of such issues, performance inefficiencies (e.g., decreased speed, increased power consumption) and/or increased cost are frequently encountered in conventional approaches.